Zombie Night (2013)

Overrated

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

A Californian town is hit with a zombie plague where the dead rise & walk around for 24 hours. Two families attempt to fight each other for the control of a panic room in one of their houses but their feuding only gives the zombies added opportunities for a meal.This is yet another of the ultra-cheap, insanely rapid turnaround features from the Asylum, an independent production studio that has become infamous in previous years for its mockbusters (ultra-cheap knockoffs of big budget Hollywood films designed to make an easy buck by fooling customers into renting or buying them). However, after a recent deal with the Syfy Channel, the Asylum has abandoned its bread & butter mockbusters for something worse – ultra-cheap generic monster films.Zombie Night is a film that at first glance might not be considered as anything other than an ultra-cheap zombie film with some familiar faces & a reliance on cheap makeup effects & a pedestrian plot. On closer inspection, the faults only get worse. The Asylum makes it a practice to rush their projects through from start to finish in only a month or less. They have improved their skill at this to the point that Zombie Night looks more polished than some of the mockbusters they had previously done (& for once there is not a ridiculously cheap CGI effect in sight). But only slightly.I could make my case on the rushed production values alone but there are some other problems, mostly in the writing stage. Personally I can write a film script in under 30 days with reasonable attention to detail & a cohesive story with no plot holes. The Asylum's stock troupe of writers (some of which do double or even triple duties in other areas of the production) seem to use up only about a week or so for their scripts. This might be achieved by cutting corners on the narrative to the point that nothing makes any real sense. Zombie Night might have three writers on board but it seems that they might have only written a rough draft & gotten that pushed through without revising it. The characters here have no real motivation other than simply reacting to things around them. The Romero template has been so commonly used & adapted for so long that the basics for zombie mythology have been taken for granted, to the point that the premise for Zombie Night – that of a 24-hour zombie plague – might be seen as normal for those who don't normally watch horror films, but for us dedicated horror fans, this kind of ridiculousness cannot pass by without us noticing it. The aforementioned 24-hour zombie plague is stupid & doesn't make any sense – zombies will not, once activated, last for only 24 hours. They will last for as long as their bodies hold out, which is almost indefinitely (or in some cases, if decomposition is halted, even forever). And the other thing I noticed that broke standard zombie rules was that some characters are bitten but do not turn into zombies – another violation of zombie film rules.Zombie Night might have gotten my "poor" rating if not for the fact that director John Gulager, the son of actor Clu Gulager & a decent director in his own right, has done a remarkable job in investing the zombie attacks with a reasonable degree of energy. While Zombie Night might not reinvent the zombie wheel or even be considered a passable zombie film, it did have some reasonably energetic zombie attacks & the basics were not completely violated enough to be a real turkey. A dodgy but not entirely uninteresting zombie flick.

I must screw my courage to the sticking place on this one. Being a fan of everything else he's done, I was expecting quite a bit more for my money from John Gulager. (I paid for the TV I saw it on, the electricity it took to get through it, and the outrageous monthly satellite bill that brought it to me, so, yeah, I paid- out the f---ing a--...) I was expecting something along the lines of Dan O'Bannon's THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD: Gulager has in past instances shown that he's more than capable of rising to the Low Budget occasion (with everything else he's done)- but, this time around, for whatever reason(s), he simply didn't deliver. At the very least, I was expecting a cameo by his father (and it would've been extra cool if said cameo had been tied into his role in THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD). Again, no such luck. I'm far from consigning Gulager to the list of Has Been Directors: he has more talent in his little toe (left foot) than most directors (p)lying their trade these days. Maybe next time he'll come through for us.

Anyone who watches Asylum-distributed Zombie Night expecting a fine movie is, of course, delusional. However, there are fun bad horror movies and garbage bad horror movies. This one falls in the latter category and is the cinematic equivalent of a greasy hamburger purchased at a grimy kiosk: nauseating, still part of the group it claims membership of (food, movies), just barely.Without the charming naivety of stuff made by people who were genuinely trying, these lazy flicks are awful in the most tiresome way. Their zombies or monsters are never scary, but the reptilian greed you glimpse behind the project is unsettling in a Lovecraftian sense.Here, the people cashing their paychecks are California Mountain Snake, Ferris Bueller's best friend and Johnny Smith - not Christopher Walken (who is not above terrible movies himself, but prefers them with a little more spirit), but the one from the Dead Zone TV series. They face a zombie invasion. Cue gore, abysmal dialogues, tedium. Searching for fun horror movies you might have missed? Look elsewhere: Neil Marshall' Dog Soldiers, Jaume Balaguero's REC, the Pastor Brothers' The Last Days, Bong Joon- ho's Gwoemul, John Fawcett's Ginger Snaps, George Romero's Diary of the Dead, John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars, Dario Argento's The Cat o' Nine Tails.That greasy hamburger is looking less and less inviting by comparison.2/10

to make a movie this horrible, and find actors this horrible. Good job making this suck so bad! :] PLEASE DON'T CATCH ME SLOW AS HELL ZOMBIE! IF I TRIP AND FALL IN FRONT OF YOU I MIGHT DIE! or you know...i could just run....or walk away. Oh no! what is that?! its slowly walking towards us! What will happen if I let me seemingly blind but not really grandmother yell really loud! They didn't even notice us! Whodathunk. Maybe we should just throw the Russian babysitter in the closet without a fight....or "i will slap your face" LLOLL Once I learned to look at this movie as a comedy then It became a way better flick. Please stop all future productions.