Day of the Dead 2: Contagium (2005)
"Every day has a beginning."
Plot
In 1968, a medical research facility is blown up by the military when it turns out that a virus has spread from a container causing the dead to rise. One of the guards tries to steal a vial of the virus but is killed in the grounds of the facility and the vial is lost in the undergrowth. Over thirty years later and the site is now a mental hospital where some of the inmates stumble upon the vial and open it, causing the virus to once again wreak havoc and create zombies.
Review
My blood is beginning to boil over and my rage can't be controlled. I'm just so freakin' annoyed that some chumps decided to film an ‘unofficial’ prequel/sequel to George A. Romero's nightmarish classic, Day of the Dead and actually have the balls to associate it with that hallowed of horror films. It's like someone slapping a 'Mona Lisa Part Two' sticker on a toddler's finger painting and then just hanging it in the Louvre. Any self-respecting fans of horror will realise that this has nothing to do with Romero but I'm more worried about new genre fans or the floating audience who don't pay much attention to the genre but enjoy their horror films from time to time. To even consider that there are people out there who will think of this as a proper sequel, I'm just appalled – hardcore fans will smell this garbage from a mile away though. I get that Romero had been on the slide for a few years with his recent zombie films not holding a candle to his original trilogy, but even his lesser efforts wouldn't entertain this travesty of a zombie flick! Confusingly for anyone who doesn’t know their remakes from their sequels and prequels, this is billed as a prequel and sequel to the original Day of the Dead. A terrible remake of Day of the Dead had been released in 2008. And then another remake, Day of the Dead: Bloodline, was released in 2017. Can everyone just stop butchering the legacy of the original? That would be great, thanks!
Day of the Dead 2: Contagium opens rather confusingly with scores of zombies being shot by the army in the research facility. There's little explanation for what is going on and it's just a hollow excuse for loads of scenes of zombies staggering around whilst the military stumble around aimlessly, waiting to get ripped apart. There’s no real narrative purpose that couldn’t have been explained in another way. It's not a bad opening ten minutes with plenty of mayhem but make the most of it - you won't see any more zombies for at least another hour. Setting this opening sequence in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1968 is a feeble effort to link in with the chronology of the Romero films - Night of the Living Dead was made and set in Pennsylvania in 1968. It’s another blatant attempt by co-creators Ana Clavell and James Dudelson to wink to the audience and say, “hey, we know our Romero history.” It is a totally superficial attempt to backfill the lore; the film is basically trying to insert itself into the timeline to explain why the dead originally rose in Romero's universe.
The film then shifts forward in time into some shameless One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest rip-off with the mental hospital that was built on the old military site being the focus and the inmates being the main characters. There's absolutely nothing of merit here. Characters clash with each other. They clash with their doctors. The doctors argue with each other. And so on for at least an hour. There's nothing remotely suspenseful or horrific during this time. Let's think about the timeline they just established for a second. The 1968 virus was contained by the military. They built a hospital over the site, and the world just went back to normal for over three decades. But if the world didn't end, then this cannot possibly be a sequel to Day of the Dead because Romero's original takes place in a bleak post-apocalyptic doomsday scenario where humanity is functionally extinct, and a few survivors are hiding in underground missile silos. It is the literal end of the world. It's like making a sequel to Titanic where the boat never sank, everyone had a lovely cruise, and we just pick up with them thirty years later at a reunion. It actively insults your intelligence. I wonder whether the directing duo of Clavell (who did the screenplay) and Dudelson have ever watched any horror films, let alone the Romero film they're supposed to be sequelising? You don't get any hint that they have, what with the complete lack of anything horror-related!
Eventually we see our first signs of some cheap-looking make-up once the virus is released and some of the characters slowly turn into zombies....and I mean slowly turn. Still, there's little sign of the impending doom to follow. I'll give the film a bit of credit here because it actually shows us the zombie's point of view for a bit, as the main characters struggle to cope with the fact they're dead and will have to start eating flesh sooner rather than later to feed the cravings. The psychological terror of becoming the monster, of retaining just enough cognitive awareness to realize you are losing your humanity is profoundly disturbing. It taps into very real human fears about degenerative diseases or losing one's agency. But forget about this saving the film in any way because the script is too weak and doesn't give anyone the chance to develop a proper character to really delve into this any further than superficial gloss.
A couple of the characters are sympathetic but that's only due to the ‘awww’ factor of seeing two mentally unstable inmates falling in love with each other - the acting in all cases is atrocious, with the bald Eastern European doctor being the highlight. He's got some truly banal lines like "even the fastest deer will get killed from crossing the street too many times." It's like a knockoff fortune cookie trying to sound profoundly philosophical and just faceplanting. What drives a Z-movie director to shoehorn these pseudo-deep meaningless proverbs into a movie about flesh-eating ghouls? Filmmakers know they are shooting a low-budget splatter film, but there is this desperate desire for prestige. They want the audience to know they are thinking about high-minded concepts like mortality, fate, or the human condition. They want to be seen as serious artists but instead of weaving those themes organically into the character motivations, they just hand a confused actor a nonsensical metaphor about a deer. The worst thing is that we've got to suffer this nonsense for a bum-numbing hour and forty five - a crazy length for a low budget splatter film.
In the end it's all just padding for the carnage-filled finale where loads of zombies break free and start their feasting. There's some pretty good gore here with dismembered corpses, crushed heads and lashings of blood thrown around like confetti. It's too little, too late to save this mess unfortunately and there's no real oomph to the attacks, they just happen. Romero's zombie attacks weren't just bloody for the sake of being bloody. They were meticulously well staged to deliver the highest shock value possible. Here they're just out there and you can see them coming a mile away. Romero understood the geometry of a scene, the claustrophobia, the barricades, the inevitable slow closing in of the horde. He built a sentence out of suspense, and the gore was just the punctuation at the end. The zombies here don't even come off scary, threatening or dangerous. The actors/stunt men in the make-up can't pretend to be zombies to save their lives. Because the characters are so thin and the staging is so flat, you aren't feeling terror, you’re just watching red corn syrup get poured on extras who don't even know how to act like they are dead. It really serves as a masterclass in the difference between merely depicting violence and actually engineering horror.
Final Verdict
Day of the Dead 2: Contagium clearly asks for all it gets. Had it just stuck with the Contagium tile it was originally penned as, then no one would have batted an eye lid and it would have just drifted into the lower end of the zombie market. The film's not overly terrible as there's enough zombie action at the beginning and the end, even if the rest of the movie stinks. However because it's billed as a follow-up and so desperately tries to shoe-horn itself into Romero’s legacy and lore, you can't help but compare it to the original. And because of that, the film blows big time.
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Day of the Dead 2: Contagium Director(s): Ana Clavell, James Donaldson Writer(s): Ana Clavell, Ryan Carrassi (adaptation & additional dialogue) Actor(s): Laurie Baranyay, Stan Klimecko, John Freedom Henry, Justin Ipock, Julian Thomas, Stephan Wolfert, Joe C. Marino, Andreas van Ray Duration: 143 mins |  |
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