Hello lords and ladies.
Welcome back to Cartoon Hangout, your place for all things cartoon.
Night of the Living Dead: Darkest Dawn is a 2015 CGI modern reimagining of the classic
zombie movie, Night of the Living Dead.
And it is awful.
Simply one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen.
It came out two years ago, but looks like some PS1 cut-scene from 20 years ago.
Every single character in this dreadful excuse of a movie looks like they took a picture
of some poor actor’s face and dragged it over a model.
In the case of the black lead, Ben, it looks even worse.
They can’t even get his freaking lips to move in realistic way.
Seriously, take a look.
What the heck?
They had a large crew working on this, but everything about it is amateurish, which is
unforgivable by 2015’s standards.
You know what other movies came out in 2015?
Inside Out, Hotel Transylvania 2, The Peanut Movie, and so on.
The voice dubbing is atrocious and you can barely hear some of the characters and at
other times the recording itself sounds like it was captured on some cheap mic.
It doesn’t help that the music in this movie and the garbage editing made me want to scratch
my eyes out.
Don’t believe me?
This is fairly early into the film.
I had a headache just trying to follow that.
Not to mention that little red effect pissed me off so bad.
Can you say ‘not subtle?’
Because it was horrible.
Anytime something scary happened or even dramatic, boom!
Red.
I don’t know if they were trying to pay homage to the original black and white, but
randomly the movie will change and be black and white.
Only for a few seconds at a time and then back to color, making me puzzled at the reason
for it.
Other than the filmmakers maybe thinking it made the movie more artsy.
Which it did not.
On top of those two things, there was this weird effect.
I don’t know what it’s called, but it was annoying.
The animation isn’t any better.
They used motion capture but if so then the actors have no experience acting like humans
because it was stilted and odd, but that possibly has to do more with the CGI than anything.
The zombies were…okay looking, but obviously abandoned the more human appearance seen in
the original, going for a more modern depiction, along with the zombies moving quickly.
Unfortunately they never sound ominous, them ripping into humans is comically terrible,
and because of the low budget, there’s never any actual tension involving them.
The story doesn’t fare great either.
It’s essentially the original, but with some slight tweaks.
I could go along with the more modern, city setting, but other changes almost completely
crap on the original.
From turning the lead into a doofus who manages to get them all killed to actually making
the father in the movie even more unlikable than the original ever did.
Even if any of you want to defend the story with “it’s just doing something different,”
the movie never does anything remotely on par or better than what you’ll find in the
original.
Which makes this a completely pointless movie that no one was looking for.
There’s plenty of other better re-imaginings and adaptations of Night of the Living Dead
out there.
You’re better off watching the classic rather than this brain-dead corpse of a movie.
And that’ll be it for this review.
If you were unlucky enough to have seen this movie and have some opinions of your own,
feel free to leave them down below.
Otherwise consider this review a warning and avoid this movie at all cost.
Thanks for watching and take care!