NIGHT OF THE ANIMATED DEAD (2021)

Studio:      Warner Bros. Home Entertainment
Director:    Jason Axinn
Writer:      John A. Russo
Producer:  Michael J. Luisi, Ralph E. Portillo, Robert Feldman, Kevin Kasha
Stars:     Josh Duhamel, Dule Hill, Katharine Isabelle, James Roday Rodriguez, Katee Sackhoff, Will Sasso, Jimmi Simpson, Nancy Travis

Review Score:

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Summary:

An animated remake of George A. Romero’s 1968 zombie classic, “Night of the Living Dead.”

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

John and his sister Barbara drive to a Pennsylvania cemetery to visit their father’s grave. Unbeknownst to the siblings, an undead outbreak causes corpses to reanimate across the country at the same time. A zombie in the cemetery attacks and kills John. Barbara flees to a nearby farmhouse.

Ben, another survivor seeking shelter from the growing zombie horde, joins Barbara in the house. With Barbara in a state of catatonic shock, Ben fights off zombies and begins boarding up the windows by himself.

Ben and Barbara discover cowardly Harry Cooper hiding in the cellar with his wife Helen and their injured daughter Karen along with a young man named Tom and Tom’s girlfriend Judy. Animosity forms when Ben asks for help fortifying the house while Harry insists on everyone bunkering in the cellar instead.

A TV news bulletin suggests the undead outbreak may have been caused by radiation from a probe returning from Venus.

The men devise an escape plan that involves gassing up at a nearby pump so they can flee in the truck Ben arrived in. Tom and Judy drive the truck while Ben uses a torch to ward off zombies from the back. At the pump, a spill causes the truck to catch fire. The engine explodes. Shrapnel kills Tom and Judy.

Ben fights his way back to the house, but Harry refuses to let him inside. Ben breaks in anyway and beats Harry to the floor.

Another TV news report shows Sheriff McClelland organizing posses to hunt and kill the undead ghouls.

Zombies besiege the farmhouse. Ben shoots Harry in his stomach during the melee. Ben stumbles down to the cellar. Helen soon follows only to find their daughter Karen eating Harry’s corpse. Karen then stabs her mother to death with a gardening trowel.

The zombie horde pulls Barbara outside. With the house now overrun, Ben bunkers in the basement. Harry’s mutilated corpse reanimates, but Ben shoots it in the head.

In the morning, Sheriff McClelland’s men arrive outside and they begin dispatching zombies. Hearing the gunshots, Ben goes back upstairs and toward a window to investigate. Mistaking him for a zombie, Sheriff McClelland directs a man named Vince to shoot Ben in the head. Ben’s body is then dragged to a pile of executed zombies that the posse sets on fire.

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Review:

“Night of the Animated Dead” only runs 70 minutes. Eight of those minutes compose one of the slowest end credit crawls you will ever see.

End credits tell us 20 people were involved with storyboarding and art design, which seems odd since “Night of the Animated Dead” is almost a shot-for-shot remake of George A. Romero’s 1968 classic “Night of the Living Dead” right down to each character’s identical appearance. What was there to design? Anyway, another 20 names are credited with overseeing the animation studio responsible for the film. That studio consists of 12 background artists, 136 various animators, 10 animation compositors, and seven 3D modelers.

By my count, that’s more than 200 people who had a hand in bringing the movie to life. Why then, does “Night of the Animated Dead” look like a single sixth-grader created a crude flipbook out of notepad scribbles doodled during math class?

It’s not an elephant in the room. It’s an entire circus that has to be acknowledged ASAP, and that is that “Night of the Animated Dead” looks absolutely awful.

I’m not trying to be insulting. I’m not trying to be hyperbolic. I’m just going to say it. “Night of the Animated Dead” looks like something I could have made by myself with freeware in an afternoon. I wouldn’t be so shocked if this were a homegrown indie made by a handful of young newcomers. DTV horror is used to seeing freshmen filmmakers and veteran hacks alike cashing in on NotLD’s public domain status. But this is a Warner Brothers Home Entertainment release that supposedly took a huge team to create, and I’ve no idea how it garnered professional distribution with a significant marketing push to boot. I feel like Barbara in the film’s first act: utterly stunned into a state of confused catatonia that this undead ugliness somehow rose from the ground it should be buried in.

“Night of the Animated Dead” wouldn’t have passed Saturday morning standards in 1968, never mind six decades later. Human characters don’t move any more fluidly than the ghouls. They’re all Frankenstein’s Monster Colorforms, waddling on two-dimensional planes as though every other frame went missing from their minimal movements of herky-jerky jankiness. In an era of “Rick and Morty,” “Adventure Time,” and Fox’s ongoing block of Sunday night Animation Domination, you simply cannot get away with low Flash-level quality like this. It’s like watching a special effects studio’s rough-cut animatic, except the film happens to be in color.

Hilariously, the only real difference I noticed between “Night of the Animated Dead” and Romero’s original is that, when the truck catches fire at the gas pump, it no longer bursts into a big ball of flames. Instead, the heat apparently causes the engine to come apart and flying bits of metal from the hood go through Tom and Judy’s skulls. Since this is one of the only alterations and it does nothing to enhance the story or the scene, I’m convinced the only reason anyone made this change is because the studio couldn’t animate an explosion.

Being a cartoon is “Night of the Animated Dead’s” hook, although even that isn’t unique. “Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated” and “Night of the Living Dead: Darkest Dawn” (review here) already did that too. Without that angle, “Night of the Animated Dead” still boasts a star-studded cast, but they’re all over the place with their performances. Katharine Isabelle of “Ginger Snaps” fame sounds like she’s reading from a page she’s seeing for the first time as opposed to being off book and in the moment. MadTV’s Will Sasso meanwhile, plays Sheriff McClelland like he’s a hammy hick in a Captain Caveman caper. These are good actors, yet no one seems synched to the same tone.

Unlike Ben, there’s no risk of mistaking “Night of the Animated Dead” for anything other than a rotting corpse that shouldn’t be shambling anywhere near your TV screen. Shoot it in the head and throw the film on the bonfire alongside every other disappointingly unnecessary addition to the NotLD multiverse.

Review Score: 25

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