There is not a single facet of this film that is good, or even decent.
I had low expectations for this film, but this sunk even lower than I could have thought. It looked like the thing was shot on a camcorder. There was all of one lens used in the entire film, which gave it that nice camcorder feel. You can see the same background depth in every shot because of this. Usually you won't notice the background revealed to you in a film, but you will if there is no change at all over every single shot.
The lighting wasn't dramatic at all and it looked more like a home film than even my flick. It didn't even try to be scary... well it did, but it was so overtly done that it made you laugh more than quiver. They relied on the sunlight too much in the film and didn't attempt to compliment it with outside lighting at all. Then at night the cemetery and house settings are so obviously artificially lit, and you can even see the lights even though it's supposed to be out in the country.
The plot makes no sense at all. Karen Wolf made no attempt to explain why the hades the lead zombie abducted these kids and kept them alive. They are just sitting there when found as if just watching TV. She obviously never even attended a funeral in her life or would know that they bury people right after the funeral, not hours later. And then some grave robbers show up--somehow they knew the caskets would still be out of the ground--and one gets killed, the other is obviously miscast as an old man.
Similarly, the dialogue form the characters is mostly all small talk and you could cut half of it and never even notice. The characterization isn't there except for two characters who contrast from the rest of the others, but the acitng manages to botch up that distinguishing.
The sound is horrid. It's like they recorded on location and added the dialogue later. The lips often never move, but people are talking. If the lips are moving, they aren't moving at the same speed as the voice. The voices don't fit the facial expressions or have any real emotion to them. The zombies make groaning noises in the same way... some have their mouths open, some don't. And it's very obvious. The dialogue doesn't seem to come form any channel, and I wonder if it was recorded in monotone and from equal distance from the microphone for every character. I'm almost sure of it.
The direction was equally bad. There were close-ups where more distant shots could be used because the close-ups seemed forced and weak for the dialogue given. Then there are long shots that need to be drastically magnified to close-ups in order to give it more dramatic feeling. The way that we see the lead zombie as a zombie for the first time is like this. It's a full body shot and we can see all of this area surrounding him, and the guy doesn't seem scary at all, even though his make-up implies we are to think that way about him.
The photography complimented the direction in its ineptitude. The opening shots are tinted blue for some unknown reason--and it's very blatant and unfitting of the time of day of the shot. A yellow, orange or red tint would have looked better, especially for illuminating the zombies' faces in the sunlight. The blue tint better have been some homage to Dawn of the Dead's blue-faced zombies, but I doubt it. Even if it was, it is bad filmmaking. There should have been darker, less focal depth lenses used to make the lighting more dramatic in many, many, many scenes indoors. You would never know it is supposed to be a horror film in this regard in a whole lot of shots.
The editing and pacing of the scenes was bland. We get a little bit of drama with the music for one actual scene when the main character is scoping out his house, but the scene just up and ends abruptly, leaving the viewer to wonder "was that it?!" There's a shot where the lead zombie bites into the neck of a guy in one shot up-close, then it cuts to another shot for some unknown reason and the guy's neck is still immaculate. And when the lead character talks to his love interest while ordering coffee, she fills up his cup, then takes it away, refills, wipes the bottom of the saucer and refills his cup again... BEFORE HE EVEN TAKES A SIP!
The acting looks like they put an ad in the paper and accepted all non-SAG-eligible actors for parts without even giving them a screen test. Except for Tom Savini, of course, who even can't overcome bad script and direction to make his character seem cool, just a one-liner-spewing, macho idiot. It speaks volumes that they hired Bill Hinezman's daughter (?) for one of the more prominent zombie parts; it backs my theory up.
Like I've put in here several times, you usually don't notice when things are done correctly (ie: you don't go "that shot had great lighting!"), but you sure as heck notice when they go awry in a film, and they go awry in every scene and almost every shot. If they made a manual for showing how NOT to make a film, they would say "watch Children of the Living Dead."
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