20 years after Day of the Dead, here we are. Romero still has some stories to tell, and he brought along with him some better actors, a bigger budget, a more engaging story. And, of course, some nice fucking gore. Tom Savini in an alternate form of Sex Machine doesn’t hurt either. But the zombies? Yeah, they still hurt. And chew. And a few new things.
Basic news reports of the past starts this one off to catch the next generation up on the narrative that helped spawned the zombie genre. Here, we have Fiddler’s Green, a peninsula city more easily defended from the loads of zombie hoards, and the people scavenging out into the surrounding areas to get the supplies for the people on the ‘inside.’ There’s some Haves and a lot of Have Nots. But there’s even more zombies. And you know what? They’s the most pissed off of em all. This is their tale. Well, more of a growl-bite-chew-growl.
This is actually kinda like an Aliens of Zombie films, switching the genre from horror to action in a lot of ways. The Dead Reckoning is a helluva vehicle for zombie stompin. While the story isn’t the most original, it still has some decent characters, most notably Simon Baker in the lead as Riley and a decent role by Italian Giallo director Dario Argento’s daughter, Asia Argento. Dennis Hopper plays a real koont as the rich guy scumbag dickhole. The Class Struggles is the metaphor for this chapter of the series, pretty obviously so. But it is a nice evolution on multiple levels here, good action and some suspense on top of the bloodiness and eviscerations. But it is still horrific in their realizations that shit’s not getting better anytime soon, and if fact with an evolution occurring, shit’s gonna be worse.
